Mayor Bob Filner will honor his commitment to sign the long-stalled tourism marketing pact with a formal ceremony he's scheduled for Thursday afternoon.

With a stroke of his pen, frozen marketing funds, collected via a 2 percent hotel room surcharge, will soon be available for promoting San Diego in advance of the coming summer traveling season.

The planned Thursday signing comes a little more than a week after Filner and the city's hotelier-run Tourism Marketing District announced they had reached an eleventh-hour compromise, ending months of feuding over millions of dollars in marketing money.

Now that the money can be finally released, the city's Tourism Authority says there is still time to place some TV commercials promoting San Diego. Although the agency had already canceled a more than $5 million television campaign, it is reinstating a joint advertising effort with SeaWorld San Diego, said agency CEO Joe Terzi.

Much of the $3.2 million earmarked for the campaign will go toward ads on cable and network television channels, but some of the funds will be used to promote San Diego on online travel agencies like Travelocity and Expedia.

"We are ecstatic this will be signed," Terzi said. "Our team is continuing to ask, has the deal been signed because they know that the money couldn’t be released until it was signed."

The Tourism Authority had previously issued layoff notices for 85 staff members, with terminations scheduled for May 13. The forthcoming funds will now mean the agency can withdraw those notices. Over the last few months, however, the tourism bureau has lost seven employees in key sales and marketing positions that it will now have to fill.

Terzi believes the uncertainty surrounding the future of tourism funding prompted several staff members to seek out new jobs. And in some cases, employees were recruited by companies familiar with the ongoing controversy. One staff member, he said, joined a meeting planning firm, another headed to the Park Hyatt Aviara, and still another was hired by Expedia, Terzi said.

As a financial precaution, the Tourism Authority had asked its members to pay their dues early, which resulted in some $400,000 it normally would have received months later, Terzi said.

Thursday's scheduled signing brings to an end a tumultuous few months during which the Tourism Marketing District sued Filner and the council subsequently passed a measure demanding that Filner sign the marketing agreement. The mayor later vetoed the resolution, and the council responding by overriding that veto.